At Katherine's request, Cornish removed the cork from the bottle and prepared a dose by mixing a heaping teaspoonful of the bromo-seltzer with a half glass of water.

[6] The decision was a judicial landmark, defining the conditions under which prosecutors could introduce evidence of previous crimes at a defendant's trial.

Generally speaking, wrote Justice William E. Werner in a formulation that even today is known as the "Molineux rule," the state "cannot prove against a defendant any crime not alleged in the indictment."

"[7]At the original trial, the prosecution had entered evidence suggesting that Molineux had been responsible for an earlier death, that of Henry Crossman Barnet, with the aim of showing that he had a propensity to murder.

[9] Barnet's death had been attributed by the attending physicians to a weakened heart caused by diphtheria,[9] despite the fact that he had become violently ill on October 28, 1898, after having taken a dose from a sample tin of Kutnow's Improved Effervescent Powder which had arrived in the mail, unsolicited, two months earlier.

On February 28, 1899, Barnet's body was exhumed and the organs, when analyzed, were found to contain the same poison; however, Molineux had never been indicted for the murder of Barnet, and the Appeals Court ruled that using "evidence" of an unproven previous act of murder against the defendant in a subsequent unrelated trial violated the basic tenet of presumption of innocence, and, therefore, such evidence was inadmissible[1] (other than on five clearly defined grounds).

[13] On November 18, 1902, one week after Molineux's acquittal, Blanche filed for divorce in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,[14] citing mental cruelty.

[19] The prosecuting New York District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner was sacked by then-Governor Theodore Roosevelt on the grounds of incompetence.